What is Mojo Nation?

by Moya K. Mason

Jim McCoy is the founder and CEO of Mojo Nation. Over the years, he has managed a number of large-scale web-based services, run IT systems for universities, and worked with companies such as Yahoo! in the startup phase. Currently, he is the founder and CTO of Autonomous Zone Industries.

What is Mojo Nation? Mojo Nation is an open-source peer-to-peer content sharing system that is used to share digital content. The swarm distribution technology enables the effective aggregation of lower bandwidth/dialup peers to deliver rich digital content.

The core is a small downloadable piece of software that is used to publish and retrieve information from Mojo Nation or through a web browser. When you first log on, you must generate a public and private key pair that will be used to identify you.

Other distributed data architectures such as Napster and Gnutella are different from Mojo Nation because they do not have what has been labeled the built-in "swarm distribution" mechanism that allows high-speed file sharing from parallel and multiple peers. Mojo Nation is also different because it brings together trust management, security through encryption, and a distributed accounting system.

The technology allows the P2P network to prevent bottlenecks by utilizing a load balancing distribution-based mechanism and an economy of incentives, using micropayments called Mojo to reward users for distributing and uploading files to the network. Whether it be resources or digital cash, everyone is expected to contribute something for the transactions they make within the community -- freeloaders are really not a problem because they cannot consume any more than they contribute. To earn Mojo you can act as a server, allow your bandwidth or hard drive space to be used, or sell services, with those buying and selling determining the prices. Prices are advertised.

As a result, users create a reputation system of sorts since the quality of service and the reliability of service providers is constantly under review and tracked by agents, which check for good connectivity, gather information, and other things, such as your proximity to resource providers.

All files that are distributed on Mojo Nation are broken into hundreds or thousands of pieces, and no files are stored in their entirety. One person doesn't have an entire file. Part of the design of Mojo Nation is that every file is actually broken up into hundreds or even thousands of pieces.

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